Carlos Sainz spent the first half of 2026 telling anyone who asked that he would not think about 2027 until the summer. The summer has arrived, Williams has 11 points and ninth place in the constructors' championship, and the thinking starts now.
"The plan is to decide, but yes, we have to look at it calmly," Sainz said after the Hungarian Grand Prix, in comments reported by MARCA.
The tone in Budapest was not calm. Asked to sum up the first half of the season, the Spaniard did not soften it: "Bad, very bad, disappointing. I think it's far below expectations and where we want to be as a team." He also dismissed the idea that the British Grand Prix front wing upgrade was the issue. "The front wing has helped, although a little less than we expected. The problem isn't the front wing, it's the whole car that isn't producing downforce."
Speaking to PlanetF1.com and other outlets, Sainz was more specific about what the season has cost him personally.
"There's no secret that my expectations - or, let's say, my timeline for how long it would take me to win a race again and for Williams to be the place to do that - have been delayed by a year or two," he said. "Obviously, I had in my mind a timeframe that I was willing to accept in order to help this team get back into a winning position and how long I was willing to wait to be fighting for wins again."
He stopped short of writing the project off. "I see what the team is investing in the future. I still see the vision of the team being pretty clear. I see how much is going on behind the scenes when you leave the current car performance aside and this still gives me confidence and motivation that we're going in the right direction."
Alex Albon's account of the same weekend explains why the doubt exists. Neither Williams got out of Q1 at the Hungaroring, and Albon's radio message - "Why is the balance changing so much" - drew an unusually direct reply from team principal James Vowles: "Alex, it was a good lap considering the car is all over the place - that's on us."
Afterwards, Albon described a car nobody at Grove can predict. "It's hard to understand what the car is doing; it changes every lap, every corner," he told reporters. "I'm kind of having to drive the car not like a qualifying lap; I'm having to drive it like a race lap, because if you push closer to a qualifying lap it will bite you, it will do something you don't expect."
Guenther Steiner, on The Red Flags Podcast, aimed higher up. The former Haas team principal put a timeline on Vowles rather than on Sainz.
"They promised us at the beginning of the season, 'We will be back; we know exactly what to do,'" Steiner said. "Guess what? They're going backwards instead of forwards at the moment. All the progress is in the wrong direction."
Asked how long he would give Vowles, Steiner set the marker at the start of next season. "If it is continuing the way that it currently is, five or six races into next year, there'll be changes. You've had enough time to read your emails and improve things. And if you haven't, then you're out."
Where Sainz goes if he leaves is the weaker part of the story. PlanetF1.com reported that a move to replace Nico Hulkenberg at Audi is now believed to be firmly off the table, and that staying at Williams remains his most likely outcome. Yahoo Sports reported Williams has put a contract worth a reported $30 million in front of him. Haas would be a step backwards, Alpine is only marginally better placed, and the one genuinely competitive vacancy - Red Bull - only exists if Max Verstappen creates it.
Sainz's own read on the fix is that the template is already on the grid. "Aston has proven to us that if you add downforce to the car, you go quicker," he said in Hungary. "So, I think we know what we need to do moving forward."
Knowing and doing have been the gap all year. Sainz will not name a date for his answer: "I honestly don't know. I cannot give you a date.".
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*Originally published on [News Formula One](https://newsformula.one/article/sainz-decides-his-future-this-summer-as-steiner-targets-vowles). Visit for full coverage.*